Abstract
This thesis investigates the factors affecting tourism policy making in an English local authority and is developed from a social/human conceptualisation of policy making. It focuses on the experiences and perspectives of the people involved in the development and delivery of policy. The author adopts a qualitative methodology that is developed from grounded theory, but also includes ideas and insights from complexity theory to create a theoretical approach that is grounded in the experiences of policy makers. Interview data is analysed to identify key themes and characteristics of the development and enactment of tourism policy in Leeds in an attempt to broaden understanding of tourism policy making. The findings are presented using the multiple voices of the policy makers and identify the specific complexities associated with tourism policy enactment and delivery in Leeds. These themes and characteristics are investigated in the context of the literature on tourism planning and policy, complexity, public policy and ideology; historical analysis of tourism policy making in England, and in Leeds and primary research into local authority policy making in Cambridge. The research identifies a process where the relationship between tangible policy and the action of policy makers is blurred and sometimes contradictory due to changes in the wider policy environment. It identifies tourism policy occurring on the margins of local authority policy making, in a turbulent environment and with multiple connections with other policy areas. It highlights the extent that tourism policy is the result of communication and negotiation, the importance of intangible activities associated with this communication and the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in policy making. The research questions some of the prevailing conceptualisations of tourism policy and the dominance of positivist approaches to tourism policy making in terms of their linearity and assumptions about causality and association. This research provides an alternative approach to understanding policy that is grounded in the experiences of those in the field. It suggests that a new theoretical approach to understanding tourism policy is needed in order to broaden the conceptualisation of policy making and deepen understanding of tourism policy, taking account of its wider characteristics and their implications and is developed from what happens in practice.